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Alan I. Abramowitz has emerged as a leading spokesman for the
view that our current political divide is not confined to a small
group of elites and activists but a key feature of the American
social and cultural landscape. The polarization of the political
and media elites, he argues, arose and persists because it
accurately reflects the state of American society. Here, he goes
further: the polarization is unique in modern U.S. history.
Today’s party divide reflects an unprecedented alignment of many
different divides: racial and ethnic, religious, ideological, and
geographic. Abramowitz shows how the partisan alignment arose out
of the breakup of the old New Deal coalition; introduces the most
important difference between our current era and past eras, the
rise of “negative partisanship”; explains how this phenomenon
paved the way for the Trump presidency; and examines why our
polarization could even grow deeper. This statistically based
analysis shows that racial anxiety is by far a better predictor
of support for Donald Trump than any other factor, including
economic discontent.